Solomon: AFL player's death now just a footnote

CommentaryOne tragedy in AFL just a footnote

JEROME SOLOMON, Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle |
October 25, 2010

Hall of Famer Don Maynard lost a teammate on Oct. 9, 1960 in Houston. A football-related death that few remember.

Don Maynard had many remarkable days on the football field.

He played in games people have talked about for half a century and likely will remember for years.

One of Maynard's most unforgettable days on the gridiron proved to be his most tragic day as a player.

It was Oct. 9, 1960, the first year of the American Football League, and Maynard's New York Titans (later the Jets) faced the Oilers at Jeppesen Stadium.

The Hall of Fame receiver from West Texas recalls giving media interviews in the locker room — after an 11-catch, 174-yard afternoon - when his teammate Howard Glenn slumped to the floor.

"It was a real hot game - always seemed it was when we played in Houston," Maynard said. "Toward the end of the game, Howard had been complaining some about not feeling well. After the game, we came on into the dressing room. Howard fell over in the dressing room there and started quivering."

A trainer kneeled over Howard and proclaimed: "He'll be OK. Just a little too much heat and football."

It wasn't the 90-degree heat. It was the football.

Glenn, 24, a guard from Vancouver, Wash., was taken by ambulance to Hermann Hospital. He left the locker room on a stretcher at 5:30 p.m. and was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m.

First recorded incident

The following day, after an autopsy, Harris County medical examiner Dr. Joseph A. Jachimczyk declared Glenn's death "accidental" due to a broken neck. There was no evidence of an injury to the brain or of heart trauma.

Newspaper accounts listed Glenn as the first player to die from injuries suffered in a major league professional football game. Two former NFL players - Dave Sparks of the Washington Redskins (1954) and Stan Mauldin of the Chicago Cardinals (1948) - died of heart attacks shortly after games.

"It all happened so fast," said Oilers running back Ken Hall. "There was no reaction at the moment."

It was a different game. A different time.

Injured players were expected to play through pain. When Glenn, who was believed to be injured from a collision with two Oilers just before halftime, staggered off the field holding on to a teammate, he was reportedly ordered back to the huddle by coach Sammy Baugh.

Doctors didn't travel with teams. The Jets didn't have a team doctor. According to the New York Times, Dr. James Nicholas, who would become known for operating on Joe Namath's knees, turned down the position the week before the Titans came to Houston.

"My conscience bothered me," Nicholas told the paper. "Glenn had a history of heat exhaustion. If I had been there, his death might have been averted."

Glenn sat on the bench for most of the second half but wasn't looked at by a doctor until he was on the ground convulsing in the locker room after the game.

It took time for Oilers team physicians Dr. James Whitehurst and Dr. Franklin M. Rivers to make it to the Jets' locker room. They recognized Glenn was suffering from something worse than heat exhaustion, but it was too late.

According to William J. Ryczek, author of Crash of the Titans: The Early Years of the New York Jets and the AFL, prior to Glenn's death, the Titans didn't even order X-rays on injured players.

"There was not a lot of concern about the long-term health of these guys," Ryczek said.

Retired Chronicle columnist Mickey Herskowitz, then a writer for the Houston Post, said he doesn't recall any special attention paid to Glenn's death.

There was no mandate from the league about the need to improve medical treatment or awareness, nor a national debate about proposed rules changes.

"It wasn't a national story," Herskowitz said. "There wasn't any big follow-up on it. It was amazing compared to today.

"They did make an announcement in the press box sometime after the game that he had died."

It's not talked about

Glenn's name hasn't been brought up in the discussion about safety issues in the NFL. Death from what happens on the football field is not something players want to think about.

Not now. Not then.

"If you did think about it, you wind up thinking about the fact that 'nothing is going to happen to me; it's going to happen to somebody else' " Maynard said. "You just show up when you're supposed to play and do what you're supposed to. That's the business."

The business was different. In his first five years as a pro football player, Maynard was a master plumber "on the side." He spent the next seven years of his playing career teaching high school math during the offseason, and he always had a sales job of some sort.

In 1960, the minimum AFL salary, which is what Glenn, who was cut by the Giants and had spent the season before playing for the Canadian Football League's Hamilton Tiger Cats, probably was making, was around $7,000, not much more than the average teacher made ($5,100).

Amazing that men would risk their lives and health for such sums. Hall, 74, has had a shoulder replacement and a shoulder procedure for a condition he jokingly describes as "too many linebackers."

"But I never got my knees hurt, and I'm able to get up every morning and do what a normal person at almost 75 does," said Hall, who lives in Fredericksburg. "We played the game because we liked the game. We didn't make any money, and we certainly didn't think about dying from playing. Things like that, an event like that death happens, and you think about it for a moment, then you put the helmet back on and go play."

Old-timers know they were tough, sometimes foolish, but few have regrets.

One of the lucky ones

"A player breaks his fingernail, and he won't even play today," Maynard, 75, said laughing. "I played with a broke foot, a broke finger. But there are probably some guys walking down the street hurting worse than I do.

"Every morning when you wake up, it takes a little longer to get up, but the good news is you wake up."

On a fateful day 50 years ago, Maynard's teammate and friend didn't wake up.

"He and I were rookies together at the New York Giants, played in Canada together, then ended up with the Titans together," Maynard said. "He was just a real fine guy. It's a shame that had to happen, and it's really a shame that more people don't know about him."